2

Eisenhower’s Dilemma

John Eisenhower walked into Andrew Goodpaster’s Spartan office in the West Wing. It was Monday morning, the second of May. The office was small but had the advantage of being just a few steps from the President’s. Adorning the wall was the formal portrait of Eisenhower that hung in embassies and post offices, but not the usual parchment Presidential commission, for officially Goodpaster was not a Presidential appointee but a Brigadier General attached to the White House.

It might have been trying for the President’s son to work for the man the President regarded almost as a son, but the two men managed their relations with tact and civility. Before John moved his family away from Washington publicity to Gettysburg in June 1959, the same White House car had picked up both men at their Alexandria homes. During the morning ride across the Potomac, the two men talked of the day’s business—or doubletalked, if state secrets had to be kept from the driver’s ears.

When John joined the White House in 1958, he had asked Goodpaster to give him a sphere of responsibility in which he could move with independence. Goodpaster declined—“either for my own education or in order for him to keep his hand in on all issues,” as John recalled. Goodpaster did keep his deputy informed. John remembered attending “a hell of a New Year’s party the night of December 31, 1958. The next morning, when I had a head the size of a pumpkin, Andy called me and told me that Batista had fallen.” The Castro epoch in Cuba had begun. “I thanked him profusely.”

The President sometimes used his son as a sounding board. Two weeks before Hiroshima, he had confided in him the secret of the atomic bomb. During a visit to John’s house in Alexandria in the fall of 1957, while Mamie played with their grandchildren, the President took him aside and said, “We’re making flights now over the Soviet Union to get material.”

The next year, as the President’s new assistant staff secretary, John went to the CIA for a briefing by Richard Bissell on the U-2: “He showed me all the pictures.… He told me about the techniques, which were a real eye-opener, and the fact that the wings were so fragile that you had to have special supports for them once the planes were on the ground.”

In the spring of 1960, John had sat in the Oval Office with the President and Goodpaster when the CIA pleaded for more U-2 flights into Russia. More than once, he and Goodpaster had heard Allen Dulles assure the President that if the Soviets ever downed a plane, no pilot would escape alive. This morning, therefore, when Goodpaster told John that a U-2 had been lost, the two men lamented the pilot’s death. As John later recalled, “There was not one scintilla of doubt in our minds that he was dead.”

Goodpaster and his deputy felt sorry for the pilot’s family but for these two Army men, there were worse fates than dying in the service of the United States. In 1952, when John said good-bye to his father before leaving to fight in Korea, there were rumors that Chinese and North Korean patrols were plotting to capture John and use the famous prisoner to blackmail the United States. His father said, “If you’re captured, I suppose I would just have to drop out of the Presidential race.”

John assured his father that he would never be captured alive. He later said, “Had I ever found myself surrounded by Chinese or North Koreans, I had every intention of keeping my promise and using my .45-caliber pistol, taking—I hoped—some of them with me.”

The President disliked it when staff members tiptoed through the Oval Office door and waited at the threshold. Even the most reserved aides learned to walk in briskly and maintain stride until they reached his desk. At 10:24 A.M., Eisenhower looked up and saw Goodpaster, whose face looked to him like “an etching of bad news.” The aide said, “Mr. President, I have received word from the CIA that the U-2 reconnaissance plane I mentioned yesterday is still missing.… With the amount of fuel he has on board, there is not a chance of his being aloft.”

Eisenhower regretted the presumed death of an American. It was cruel, but he had long ago consoled himself that the U-2 pilots were flying “with their eyes wide open.” (“What the hell,” a more flippant White House aide said later. “They were paying ’em thirty grand!”) On Sunday, Goodpaster had promised that he would “stay in touch with CIA” and “take a look at our cover plan.” Since then, a CIA man had brought over the agreed-upon draft of the cover story. The President later recalled having doubts, but he read the document, nodded assent and handed it back to Goodpaster.

Robert Amory of the CIA often timed his morning drive to listen to The CBS World News Roundup on his car radio. He knew Allen Dulles would be listening to that. CIA headquarters in 1960 was a cluster of manila and gray Georgian buildings up the hill from the State Department. The President had laid the cornerstone for the massive new white complex across the river at Langley, Virginia, but the new building would not be ready for another year. When Amory reached his office, he ran his eyes over a superpriority message on the U-2 and said, “One of our machines is down.”

Richard Bissell walked in hopping mad. Before the Powers mission, to preserve secrecy, he had demanded that incoming intelligence on Soviet air defense be sent directly to him. But on Sunday, when tracking stations notified the National Security Agency in Baltimore that the Russians were shooting at an enemy plane, someone erred and disobeyed Bissell’s command. An excited technician at NSA had evidently sent the news to nerve centers at the FBI, State Department, Army, Navy, Air Force and CIA.

“I thought I’d shut this thing down!” shouted Bissell. NSA’s mistake could make the cover story harder to sell around Washington. When the government publicly announced that it did not know the whereabouts of its stray weather plane, what if someone leaked the fact that NSA had traced it thirteen hundred miles into Russia?

That could cause problems—but not dire ones, so long as the U-2 pilot was dead. In the Director’s office, Bissell assured Allen Dulles and colleagues that it was “impossible” for the pilot to have survived the crash.

Just after dawn in Turkey, someone pounded on the door of Barbara Powers’s house trailer. She dragged her leg with its plaster cast out of bed and hobbled to the door: “This had better be good.”

A U-2 pilot told her that her husband was missing: “We have search planes out, but they haven’t found him yet.”

The base doctor injected her with a sedative. While she slept, the defiant U-2 pilots and their wives tried to forget their anxieties by throwing a party that lasted three days.

In Lubyanka Prison, Moscow, an old Russian woman woke up Frank Powers and set down a tin samovar and cup. He worried that the tea was laced with drugs, but drank it to soothe his arid mouth and throat. Guards locked him into a bathroom, where they watched his ablutions through a peephole.

After more interrogation, he was driven through Moscow. Riding in a limousine with six of his captors, Powers peered out at the Kremlin, Moscow University and a city transforming itself for President Eisenhower’s visit in June. The Russians asked him friendly questions about his country. He wondered whether they might not allow him to survive after all: perhaps Khrushchev would take him to the Paris Summit and say, “Here, Ike, is something that belongs to you!”

But back in his cell, depression resumed. He considered himself a fool to think the Russians would believe his lies: once they found him out, they would surely put him to death.

Tuesday, the third of May. The President flew to Fort Benning, Georgia, for a long-planned six-hour demonstration of the U.S. Army’s latest war machines. What went through his mind as he rode in a jeep and stared at a row of photoreconnaissance planes?

At the end of the pageant, Eisenhower gave a speech: “A day like this makes a man quite ready to call all those people mistaken—if not worse—who say that America has become soft and is not capable of defending herself.”

While the President was at Benning, NASA handed out the cover story he had secretly approved:

A NASA U-2 research airplane being flown in Turkey on a joint NASA-USAF Air Weather Service mission apparently went down in the Lake Van, Turkey, area at about 9:00 A.M., (3:00 A.M., E.D.T.), Sunday, May 1.

During the flight in eastern Turkey, the pilot reported over the emergency frequency that he was experiencing oxygen difficulties. The flight originated in Adana with a mission to obtain data on clear air turbulence.

A search is now underway in the Lake Van area. The pilot is an employee of Lockheed Aircraft under contract to NASA. The U-2 program was initiated by NASA in 1956 as a method of making high-altitude weather studies.

Near Pound, Virginia, two men from Washington walked into Oliver Powers’s cobbler’s shop and told him that his son was missing on a weather flight in Turkey: planes had been searching for three days without success.

Wednesday, the fourth of May. Reporters asked NASA for details about the missing “weather plane,” but most editors yawned. The Washington Post ran a small item on the front page of early editions but dropped it to accommodate a headline about a Washington Senators game.

The President enjoyed a jovial breakfast with sixteen congressmen, signed a wheat agreement with India, saw staff members and drove out to Burning Tree Club in Maryland for eighteen holes. Three days after the U-2’s disappearance, the Russians still had not complained. Eisenhower mused that Foster Dulles’s prophecy might prove right, after all.

Other evidence suggested the same conclusion. Today’s Pravda reported that the Soviet Air Force commander, Marshal Konstantin Vershinin, would arrive in Washington in ten days as scheduled for a tour of the United States. At the test ban talks in Geneva, the Russians had agreed to join the United States to explore new detection methods for small underground tests. Would Khrushchev have permitted such concessions if he was planning to disrupt relations over the U-2?

This reasoning made sense if one assumed, as some American officials did, that power in the Soviet Union was wholly centralized in the hands of Khrushchev and his close allies. Eisenhower and his advisers did not fully know that the Kremlin’s silence, the failure to cancel Vershinin’s trip and the Soviet move at Geneva were all merely holding actions. The internal debate on how to handle the U-2 had evidently been deferred until the fourth of May. In Moscow, at a secret one-day session in the gray building that some Westerners called “the Little Kremlin,” members of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party were wrangling over that question at this very moment.

For days, Khrushchev had been pondering his decision: should he sweep the U-2 under the rug or reveal it in a propaganda assault that would stir up Soviet and world opinion against the United States?

If he swept the matter under the rug, the Paris Summit and Eisenhower’s trip to Russia might proceed. But this would give Khrushchev’s enemies a powerful weapon. They would argue that Khrushchev had been so overwhelmed by Eisenhower that he was willing to tolerate even such a grave infraction during a period of supposedly improved relations. What else could they expect from a man who wished to cut the armed forces and take other “reckless” chances with Soviet security?

Dramatic revelation of the U-2 downing and a propaganda attack on the United States would satisfy Khrushchev’s critics and would put the Americans on the defensive—especially in the Third World. But as a master propagandist and agitator of more than forty years, Khrushchev knew that once such a storm was started, it could be impossible to control. The period of good feeling which began at Camp David would surely be over. The indignation of Soviet outer circles and the Soviet people might endanger the Paris Summit and compel re-escalation of the Cold War.

Khrushchev was the man who had extolled the American President and peaceful coexistence as no Soviet leader had before. Casting Eisenhower and the Americans as villains now would be a grandiose, humiliating public confession of how wrong he had been. The Soviet people were bound to discover that the United States had repeatedly penetrated Soviet air defenses for four years. Why had Khrushchev allowed such assaults? Unlike the Chinese, the Russians did not set dunce caps on the heads of discredited leaders and send them through jeering mobs, but such confessions were no formula for political survival in the Soviet Union.

Members of the Central Committee talked through the day and into the night. The U-2 was not their only subject: a party reshuffling promoted men who, on the whole, were said to be less loyal to Khrushchev than their predecessors. By the end of the session, it was clear that the U-2 downing would have to be publicized. But how?

Khrushchev proposed a plan. Tomorrow the Supreme Soviet would convene in Moscow. He would inform the parliament’s members that the United States had sent a spy plane into Soviet territory. He would reveal that the plane had been shot down, but not that the pilot had been captured alive.

As Khrushchev later recalled, “Our intention here was to confuse the government circles of the United States. As long as the Americans thought the pilot was dead, they would keep putting out the story that perhaps the plane had accidentally strayed off-course and been shot down in the mountains on the Soviet side of the border.” Later Khrushchev would reveal that, in fact, the pilot was alive and that the Soviets had equipment proving that his mission had been espionage.

By managing the news, Khrushchev could thus present himself not as the timid victim of American spy flights but as the leader of the mighty forces which had defended the Soviet motherland by shooting down the intruder plane. By tricking the Americans into expanding upon their fable that the U-2 was a stray weather plane and then exposing it, he could put them on the defensive as obvious liars guilty of espionage. After that, he might magnanimously accept President Eisenhower’s apology and fly into Paris on the heels of a propaganda victory.

That evening, Khrushchev attended a reception at the Czechoslovak Embassy. Sauntering over to a group of diplomats, he revealed that tomorrow at the opening session of the Supreme Soviet, he would have something “stupendous” to say.

Thursday morning, the fifth of May. During the workweek, Khrushchev liked to spend the night at his five-room flat in a Moscow apartment block near the Canadian Embassy that housed the elite. The living room was said to be adorned with a large photograph of the Kremlin, books on Lenin, Stalin, Marxism, capitalism, and Khrushchev’s favorite hemlock rocking chair. A few minutes away, thirteen hundred Soviets were moving into the white chamber of the Great Kremlin Palace, where they sat down, conversed and scanned Pravda and Izvestia. Some wore vivid costumes of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Television and newsreel cameramen crouched atop a catwalk.

Llewellyn Thompson, American Ambassador to the Soviet Union, sat in a prominent box at the right of the hall. During the May Day parade, when he saw the commotion as Khrushchev was told of the U-2 downing, he had turned to his wife Jane and said, “Jesus, I wonder what’s happening now.”

Lean, gray, modest, with sparkling blue eyes, Thompson was the image of a diplomat and a godfather to the improvement in American-Soviet relations. His wife said years later, “You wanted so much with all your heart and soul for there to be an understanding.” The Thompsons were sometimes asked to Khrushchev’s dacha thirty minutes outside Moscow, where the lord of the manor showed off his corn and horses and told chilling stories about the last days of Stalin. On one such weekend, Khrushchev’s Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan said, “If Stalin could only see us now, with the American Ambassador here, he’d turn in his grave.”

At the end of such visits, the Thompsons would rush back to Moscow, where the envoy hushed his wife as he scribbled out recollections of what Khrushchev had said. Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times felt that Thompson was, “in a curious way,” closer to Khrushchev than even Khrushchev’s colleagues on the Presidium.

Born in 1905, Tommy Thompson had worked his way through the University of Colorado before joining the Foreign Service. During the Second World War, as American second secretary in Moscow, he slept underground in the Metro while German bombers roared overhead. After postings in London, Washington, Rome and Vienna, he returned to the Moscow embassy as top man in 1957. This morning, when a Kremlin guard brought him to his choice box, Thompson was surprised: he was one of the most junior members of the Diplomatic Corps in Moscow. He thought, There is something funny about this.

Khrushchev’s arrival on stage touched off resounding applause. The leader grinned, clapped his own fleshy hands and the room fell quiet: “Comrade Deputies! This session of the Supreme Soviet has convened in the spring—a wonderful time. Spring is a joyful season and the Soviet people are reinforcing nature’s work with their own inspired labor.”

For two hours, he gasconaded about the tenfold revaluation of the ruble and the abolition of the Soviet income tax by 1965. After an intermission, he spoke about other domestic issues. Then he turned to the world scene:

“As you know, on May sixteenth, a meeting will take place in Paris involving the leaders of the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain and France.” Success at the Summit was “essential if a solid basis is to be laid for peaceful coexistence between states with different social systems.”

But there was cause for alarm. “Certain ruling circles in the United States have at present not reached the conclusion that a relaxation of tension and the solution of controversial problems through negotiation is necessary. Lately influential forces—imperialist and militarist circles, whose stronghold is the Pentagon—have become noticeably more active in the United States. These aggressive forces stand for the continuation of the Cold War and the arms race. And they have been going in for downright provocation.”

Now Khrushchev almost shouted: “Comrade Deputies! On the instructions of the Soviet government, I must report to you on aggressive actions against the Soviet Union in the past few weeks by the United States of America.

“The United States has been sending aircraft that have been crossing our state frontiers and intruding upon the airspace of the Soviet Union. We protested to the United States against several previous aggressive acts of this kind and brought them to the attention of the United Nations Security Council. But as a rule, the United States offered formalistic excuses and tried in every possible way to deny the facts of aggression—even when the proof was irrefutable.”

The U.S. had sent such a plane on April 9, 1960. “The American military apparently found this impunity to their liking and decided to repeat their aggressive act. The day they chose for this was the most festive day for the working peoples of all countries—May Day!

“On this day, early in the morning, at 5:36 Moscow time, an American plane crossed our frontier and continued its flight deep into Soviet territory. The Minister of Defense immediately reported this aggressive act to the government. The government said, ‘The aggressor knows what he is in for when he intrudes upon foreign territory.… Shoot down the plane!’

“This assignment was fulfilled. The plane was shot down.”

Earsplitting applause from the audience: “Shame to the aggressor! Shame to the aggressor!”

Khrushchev said, “The first investigation showed that this plane belonged to the United States of America—”

“Outright banditry!” someone cried (or so Pravda later reported). “How can this be squared with Eisenhower’s pious speeches?”

“Just imagine what would have happened had a Soviet aircraft appeared over New York, Chicago or Detroit,” said Khrushchev. “How would the United States have reacted?” He twisted his neck to glare up at Thompson: “What was this? A May Day greeting?”

Delegates whooped and stamped their feet. Thompson put on his blandest poker face: so this was why he was seated so prominently.

“The question then arises: who sent this aircraft across the Soviet frontier? Was it the American Commander-in-Chief who, as everyone knows, is the President? Or was this aggressive act performed by Pentagon militarists without the President’s knowledge? If American military men can take such actions on their own, the world should be greatly concerned.” Khrushchev charged that “American aggressive circles” were trying to “torpedo the Paris Summit or, at any rate, prevent an agreement for which the whole world is waiting.”

Now he capped off the outrage he had so artfully whipped up: “It is understandable that we are seized by feelings of indignation at the American military provocations. But this must not guide our actions. We must be guided not by emotion but reason.…

“We address the American people: in spite of these aggressive acts against our country, we have not forgotten the friendly encounters we had during our visit to America. Even now, I profoundly believe that the American people—except for certain imperialist and monopolist circles—want peace and friendship with the Soviet Union.… I do not doubt President Eisenhower’s sincere desire for peace.”

After four hours of oratory, Khrushchev ended his speech with a raspy cry: “Under the banner of Lenin, under the Communist Party’s leadership, to new victories in the building of Communism!” A final roar, and the audience leapt to its feet. Western reporters fled the hall for the Central Telegraph Office on Gorky Street.

In Washington, it was seven o’clock on Thursday morning. From the White House, Gordon Gray’s secretaries called Thomas Gates, Allen Dulles and other members and staff of the National Security Council to go at once to helicopter pads in the District, Maryland and Virginia. George Kistiakowsky, the President’s science adviser, was in the shower when his telephone rang. His caller refused to give him time to towel himself but allowed him to dry his hands so that he could jot down instructions.

What made the most powerful men in the Executive Branch rush to helicopters? Not Khrushchev’s speech: the text had not yet reached Washington. The exercise was part of a long-planned Doomsday rehearsal to insure government continuity should Washington be destroyed by nuclear attack. The choppers’ destination was High Point, a top-secret command post tunneled thirty minutes away in Virginia’s Blue Ridge. The previous day, Richard Nixon had called the President from New York and asked if it was “imperative” that he go to High Point. Eisenhower had excused him.

This morning, Gates was driven to his takeoff point in northwest Washington by his wife in her nightgown. He had forgotten his pass; for a while, guards refused to let him through. Kistiakowsky had another problem: a black Cadillac was blocking his driveway in Georgetown. Hovering over the stalled engine was a “highly agitated” Allen Dulles. The scientist helped the CIA Director push the car aside and they rode away together. Dulles could not have helped but think that everything was breaking down on him this week.

At 7:36, United Press International’s New York bureau sent a message to Washington:

WA

REUTERS SAYING KHRUSHCHEV SED IN SPEECH TDAY TT U.S. PLANE SHOT DOWN SUNDAY FR VIOLATING SOVIET AIR SPACE. SUG CK DEF DEPT. SAP.

NXD JL736A5/5

A UPI man in Washington called a Pentagon spokesman, who said, “It strikes me cold.”

Hugh Cumming was driving back to the Capital from Charlottesville, Virginia, when he turned on his car radio and heard, “Premier Khrushchev said today the Soviet Union shot down an American plane Sunday inside Soviet territory—” Cumming nearly drove into a ditch. At the first telephone he saw, he screeched to a stop and called the State Department.

Near the U-2 base in Atsugi, Japan, Sammy Snider was flying a T-33 and listening to music on Armed Forces Radio. The bulletin came. Snider turned to his co-pilot and said, “One of us is down.”

The two men landed the plane, drove back to Atsugi and learned who the missing pilot was. For Snider, there was a sense of “There but for the grace of God go I.” He and Frank Powers had served in the same Air Force wing at Turner, gone through U-2 training and served in Turkey together. At the Atsugi base, he found that “everyone was holding his breath to see what would happen.”

At High Point, helicopters set down like pigeons on a telephone wire. The President and twenty-two others were rushed into the humid air-conditioned hideout. Such rehearsals usually included the Presidential announcement “I declare martial law.” Early in the meeting, Allen Dulles reported on the first part of Khrushchev’s speech, which had reached High Point by teletype. He said the next item seemed to be a tough statement of some kind on the United States and the Paris Summit.

The CIA’s Herbert Scoville and the Pentagon’s Herbert York gave a history of Soviet and American long-range missiles, which Kistiakowsky found “boring.” As they spoke, staff aides popped in with teletype rippings; the men at the table whispered among themselves. Goodpaster was called to a secure telephone to talk to James Hagerty, the President’s press secretary. Hagerty asked about Khrushchev’s allegations: the White House press was already breaking down his door. What should he tell them? Goodpaster had a quiet word with the President and told Hagerty he should say nothing until hearing back from him either by telephone or in person.

Scoville and York finished their briefing but the group’s attention had turned to the events in Moscow. Eisenhower asked senior officials of State, Defense and CIA to join him in an adjoining lounge. At 10:32 A.M., they sat down on sofas and chairs—Gordon Gray, Dulles, Gates and Douglas Dillon, Acting Secretary of State in Christian Herter’s absence. Goodpaster brought in the final portion of Khrushchev’s speech.

Someone said they must refute Khrushchev’s charges at once. The President disagreed: NASA’s release had said enough. They should say nothing now until they learned what Khrushchev would do next. But others wanted an immediate statement: the American government’s silence might be taken as tacit admission that Khrushchev’s charges were true. Eisenhower relented, and asked Dillon to draft a statement. To avoid confusion, he ordered that all public information about the U-2 be given out by the State Department and no one else.

At 10:45, they rose. The President went to a Signal Corps studio inside the hideout and gave High Point workers a one-minute pep talk on closed-circuit television. With Goodpaster, Gray and other aides, he boarded his chopper. At 11:23, they landed at the White House, where Jim Hagerty was furious. Reporters had been badgering him all morning about Khrushchev’s speech and he had not heard back from Goodpaster for more than an hour.

With his Irish face and temper, his ever-present cigarette and energetic drinking, Hagerty seemed to some as if he belonged almost anywhere but the Eisenhower White House. Born in 1909, he spoke in the manner of the Bronx, where he grew up the son of the New York Times’s chief political correspondent. After graduation from Columbia, he too joined the Times, for which he followed the rough-and-tumble politics of Albany. During the war, Governor Thomas Dewey hired him as his press secretary. In 1952, when Eisenhower was looking for a seasoned man to handle the press, Dewey told him, “Take mine—he’s the best there is.”

Hagerty’s hybrid background trained him to think as both reporter and politician, but reporters were badly mistaken if they presumed that Hagerty’s client was anyone other than Dwight David Eisenhower. He worked hard to make up for the President’s Olympian attitude toward the press; reporters on Presidential trips enjoyed good food, lodging and telephones. He gave the illusion of candor by overwhelming with detail: during Eisenhower’s heart attack, he told reporters more than anyone might have ever wished to know about what the President was wearing, eating, drinking, reading, listening to.

During a Presidential trip to Paris, Art Buchwald published a parody of a Hagerty briefing in the Paris Herald Tribune: “Q. Jim, whose idea was it for the President to go to sleep? A. It was the President’s idea.… Q. What did he say to the Secretary of State? A. He said, ‘Good night, Foster.’” Hagerty found this not the least amusing and excoriated Buchwald in the Hotel Crillon lobby in front of other reporters.

The Eisenhower White House sprang few leaks. More than any administration since Hoover’s, the Eisenhower people were disinclined to mix with reporters. Interviews were scheduled through Hagerty, and Hagerty was not shy about refusing. Inside the West Wing, “Jim didn’t mince words,” as his colleague Kevin McCann recalled. “If the entire Cabinet was in favor of something and Jim thought it would not sit well … he’d fight and he’d fight hard. He was not afraid of anyone.”

As with Goodpaster, the President saw Hagerty as something of a son. If Goodpaster appealed to Eisenhower’s ascetic, nonpartisan, West Point side, Hagerty appealed to the more political Eisenhower who made wisecracks, was not unaware of public relations and privately inveighed against difficult figures like Joseph McCarthy and de Gaulle while disdaining public discussion of personalities. At one famous moment, when the President asked him to give a less-than-can-did statement to the press, Hagerty demurred and said that reporters would give him hell. The President smiled, walked around his desk, patted him on the back and said, “My boy, better you than me.”

Hagerty was told that the President was back from High Point. At 11:47, he walked into the Oval Office and crisply told Eisenhower and Goodpaster that Khrushchev’s charges were such a major story that the President must speak to the press at once.

This raised Goodpaster’s hackles: if the American government was going to hand out a deliberate lie, he wanted the President kept as far away from it as possible. Otherwise, if the lie should be exposed, the President’s good name might be tarnished. But Goodpaster was handicapped from fully making his case: the U-2 was so secret that Hagerty was not cleared to know. Even at this crucial moment, as Goodpaster later recalled, he and Eisenhower did not tell him the full truth about the flight. Hence Hagerty persisted in arguing that the President be involved as much as possible with this story.

The cant of the age had it that Eisenhower was too tired or lazy or dumb to take command of his job: while the President toured the nation’s golf links, the government was run by faceless White House aides. As John Eisenhower later said, “Nobody wanted to take the Old Man on in a frontal attack.… So they would try to walk around saying, ‘Ike’s a good guy, but he’s over the hill. Those evil boys in the government are not telling him what they’re doing. And he’s sort of a constitutional monarch.’”

Hagerty considered it his sacred mission to demonstrate that his President was always on top of the job. How would it look if the President declined comment on a matter so urgent as Khrushchev’s charges? Hagerty fought and he fought hard. He wanted Eisenhower to meet the press and to put reporters in touch with NASA, since NASA (as far as he knew) owned the plane.

The President ruled out meeting the press but agreed to let Hagerty announce that NASA and State were investigating Khrushchev’s charges and would publicize the results. Goodpaster was displeased, but not Hagerty. He left the Oval Office at 11:51 to brief reporters.

In 1960, roughly fifteen reporters were assigned full-time to the White House—AP, UPI, ABC, CBS, NBC, Mutual, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and a half dozen newspapers. They resided in a small room off of the White House lobby crowded with desks, ancient typewriters, greasy telephones and a poker table where Harry Truman had dropped by for an occasional hand. One of Hagerty’s female aides usually called a briefing by opening her door and shouting, “Press!” whereupon reporters entered Hagerty’s office and formed a semicircle.

At 12:05 P.M., standing behind his desk and in front of a picture of himself with the President, Hagerty read out a statement on Khrushchev’s accusations: “At the direction of the President, a complete inquiry is being made. The results of this inquiry, the facts as developed, will be made public by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Department of State.”

Ray Scherer of NBC called his bureau and was told, “Why don’t you go over to NASA?” With Newsweek’s Charles Roberts and other reporters, he trotted across Pennsylvania Avenue and Lafayette Square to the eighteenth-century home of Dolley Madison that now served as NASA headquarters. Scherer pushed through the front door and called out, “Where’s the statement?”

“What statement?” asked a secretary.

“The statement that Jim Hagerty said you were going to put out!”

Even Walter Bonney, NASA’s information chief, was baffled. As other reporters arrived, he went to his inner office, called Hagerty, returned and announced that he would issue NASA’s statement at 1:30 P.M.

For reporters to have arrived and found that NASA did not know what Hagerty was talking about handed the President’s critics an irresistible example of administration dysfunction. “I’m not sure whose error it was,” Goodpaster said years later. “I would say it probably lay between Hagerty and me.… Either Hagerty or I should have seen that these people were well-primed over there.… Because we had changed the mode of handling it in the midst of the affair, that’s where things come unstrung and this came unstrung.”

On the fifth floor of the State Department, Douglas Dillon pressed the telephone receiver to his ear and scrawled on a pad. At the other end of the line was Allen Dulles at the CIA. As Dillon later recalled, “We were talking back and forth, trying to draft a statement as to what we were going to say about this damn thing. We were having a hell of a time.”

The two men felt that the less said, the better. When they finished writing, Dillon called Goodpaster and read him the statement. Goodpaster suggested a few changes and told Dillon that the President had changed his mind about assigning public comment on the U-2 purely to State. NASA would also put out a statement with greater detail. Dillon gave the finished draft to Lincoln White, the State Department spokesman. White was angry that Dillon had not told him about the problem the minute he arrived from High Point. At 12:45 P.M., he met reporters and read out the unsigned handiwork of Dillon and Dulles:

“The Department has been informed by NASA that, as announced May 3, a U-2 weather research plane based at Adana, Turkey, piloted by a civilian, has been missing since May 1. During the flight of this plane, the pilot reported difficulty with his oxygen equipment. Mr. Khrushchev has announced that a U.S. plane has been shot down over the U.S.S.R. on that date. It may be that this was the missing plane. “It is entirely possible that, having a failure in the oxygen equipment which could result in the pilot losing consciousness, the plane continued on automatic pilot for a considerable distance and accidentally violated Soviet airspace. The United States is taking this matter up with the Soviet government, with particular reference to the fate of the pilot.”

“What was the plane doing? Weather reconnaissance?”

“NASA is briefing reporters on the full details of that.”

“You say this plane was from Adana, Turkey. Is that the U.S. Air Force base down there?”

“As I say, you better get this information from NASA.…”

“Linc, how do you know the pilot was having difficulty?”

“He reported it.”

“Linc, do you have any comment on the rest of Khrushchev’s speech—his statement that the Summit looks gloomy now because of aggressive American action?”

“No.”

During the past two days, Richard Bissell had given NASA detailed cover information on the U-2 in question-and-answer form. Now Goodpaster called NASA’s administrator, T. Keith Glennan: NASA should put Bissell’s material in a written memorandum and issue that as the result of NASA’s inquiry. Goodpaster thought a written statement by NASA would be better than “turning the press loose on them.”

Walter Bonney worked Bissell’s material into a rough statement, which he gave to a secretary. She corrected some of the language, retyped it on a multilith mat and ran off copies. At 1:30, Bonney entered Dolley Madison’s ballroom. Thirteen months before, he had presented the seven Mercury astronauts in this room (“These are our astronaut volunteers. Take your pictures as you will, gentlemen.”) Now, dreading the prospect of lying to reporters who liked and trusted him, he drew a deep breath and read aloud:

“One of NASA’s U-2 research airplanes, in use since 1956 in a continuing program to study gust-meteorological conditions found at high altitude, has been missing since about 9:00 Sunday morning, local time, when the pilot reported he was having oxygen difficulties over the Lake Van, Turkey, area.” Planned route: 1,400 nautical miles. Flight time: 3 hours, 45 minutes. Pilot was last heard from flying northeast. Maximum altitude: 45,000 feet. Mission’s purpose: gathering information on “clear air turbulence, convective clouds, wind shear, the jet stream and such widespread weather patterns as typhoons.”

Why was the plane flying so close to Russia? Weather research was worldwide. Replying to another question, Bonney said that the U-2 had cameras “but they are not reconnaissance cameras. They are cameras to cover cloud pictures.” He added that the U-2 “weather missions” had never been classified secret. “We are still searching for the airplane in the Lake Van area. It may be a waste of effort. If the Russians would care to identify the plane as the U-2, a civilian plane carrying no armament and only research equipment, then we could stop looking.”

At State, Douglas Dillon was on the telephone with Allen Dulles when Lincoln White walked into the room looking stricken. White gave him the text of the NASA statement, just ripped off the teletype. Dillon read the tearing, groaned and told Dulles, “God, get the ticker!”

Dillon had known that NASA would be issuing a more detailed statement but had not expected that the statement would include so much information that the Russians could disprove: “This statement was absolutely crazy because we knew the Russians would jump us on it.”

It was Thursday evening in Moscow. At a Soviet Press Day reception, some Russian journalists invited an attractive young American reporter named Priscilla Johnson to dinner. When she refused, one of the Russians asked, “Why are you always so shy?” and took her by the arm into the private dining hall of the House of Journalists, where hundreds of Soviet editors and reporters ate and drank.

Well into the meal, Izvestia’s thirty-six-year-old editor, Alexei Adzhubei, rose and shouted, “Is there an American in the room?” Adzhubei was Khrushchev’s son-in-law and the butt of many private jokes: Party members revised the Russian proverb that a hundred friends were better than a hundred rubles to say instead, “Better to be married like Adzhubei than to have a hundred rubles!” A backslapper like his father-in-law, he was said to be much involved with a woman not his wife. Khrushchev was said to have warned him to be more discreet.

When Adzhubei asked his question, all eyes in the room turned to Johnson. He declared that it was easy to see that she was the best-looking American correspondent in Moscow. All right! (He mimicked a plunging plane with his index finger.) What did she think of the incident Nikita Sergeyevich had revealed to the Supreme Soviet?

Someone cried that she must defend her country’s honor. Shakily she stood and proposed a toast to peace, friendship and—as Nikita Sergeyevich had so often said—an end to taxes for weapons.

But this only increased the crowd’s appetite for more. With hoots and shouts, they compelled her to walk down the long room to drink a toast with Adzhubei. As he touched his glass to hers, he showed off more of his uproarious sense of humor. Johnson looked down and saw a row of Chinese faces grinning back. As she groped her way back to her chair, a Russian stood, held his glass to hers and leered, “Do you fly?” A Soviet foreign affairs writer rose and proposed a toast to “our only friends, the Chinese.”

Llewellyn Thompson was attending a more sedate affair held by the Ethiopian Embassy at the Sovietskaya Hotel. Mrs. Thompson had stayed home; her children had the mumps. Within his earshot, the Swedish Ambassador drifted up to the Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister, Jacob Malik: Under what article of the UN Charter were the Soviets going to raise the plane incident?

Malik said they didn’t know yet: they were still questioning the pilot. Malik told the Indian Ambassador that the American plane “was flying at sixty thousand feet and had been followed by radar all the way and destroyed deep in Soviet territory when it turned to go back.”

Still questioning the pilot? Thompson rushed back to his embassy. Since Khrushchev’s speech (as his wife later recalled) he had been trying to telephone the State Department but had not been able to get through to Washington. Now he sent a “MOST URGENT” cable to Dillon in Washington.

Malik’s slip of the tongue was the first concrete indication that the Russians might have captured the U-2 pilot alive. Had Thompson’s cable reached Washington in time, it might have kept the Americans from releasing the NASA statement that could be so damningly contradicted by a live U-2 pilot. But the cable arrived at 1:34 P.M.—four minutes after Walter Bonney began reading the statement at NASA.

Years later, the defector Arkady Shevchenko wrote that after word of the indiscretion reached Khrushchev, Malik fell to his knees before his leader, weeping, and begged forgiveness. By Shevchenko’s account, Khrushchev forced Malik to confess his crime to colleagues at the Foreign Ministry, where he bleated, “Comrades, I have never before revealed state secrets,” and they howled with laughter.

That was not Thompson’s interpretation. Senior Soviet diplomats simply did not make such extravagant faux pas. By his wife’s recollection, Thompson believed that Khrushchev was using Malik to get the message to the Americans that they should make no statements that could ultimately jeopardize the Paris Summit and a Soviet-American understanding.

After sending his alert to Washington, Thompson wrote a more ruminative cable on Khrushchev’s Supreme Soviet speech. As the man who probably knew Khrushchev better than any other American, he took pains to dissuade colleagues in Washington from jumping to the conclusion that Khrushchev had given up on détente. What had impressed Thompson was not Khrushchev’s ferocity but his moderation:

Although showing anger and arousing strong reaction from deputies by his words and manner about the plane incident, the moment shouts started from the floor, he immediately moved to resume his speech and shut off any hostile demonstration.

As I listened to his remarks on the plane incident, it appeared to me that they had been carefully considered in order not—repeat not—to slam any doors. The fact that the Soviets made a move toward our position on the underground test problem at Geneva and the fact that they announced Marshal Vershinin’s visit to the U.S. after the facts of the plane incident were known to them would appear to indicate that while they expect to make full propaganda exploitation, they do not wish it to prevent carrying out previous policies and, in particular, wish to proceed with the President’s visit.

As the sun set in Washington on the long day which had begun with the early-morning flight to High Point, the President was unwinding in the family quarters of the White House. Mamie answered the telephone. John Eisenhower was calling from Denver, where he was seeing his ailing maternal grandmother. He had seen the U-2 headlines and asked how his father liked the news.

The First Lady relayed the question to the President and he barked, “Do you think I ought to like it?”

Friday, the sixth of May. The American Embassy in Moscow named Francis Gary Powers as the pilot of the missing “unarmed weather research plane” and asked the Soviet Foreign Ministry for “full facts” about the fate of the plane and pilot.

In the Great Kremlin Palace, the Supreme Soviet convened for its second session. Marshal Andrei Grechko, commander of Soviet ground forces, lampooned the American claim that the pilot was unconscious. What about other pilots who had violated Soviet airspace? “Were they unconscious too? Are they suggesting that the crews of American planes sent to intrude upon our territory lose consciousness the minute they cross the Soviet border? Really, this is a new problem for medicine!”

Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, wartime envoy to Washington, declared, “If the Western powers think we are weak because we show patience, they are miscalculating.”

A Byelorussian delegate: “The Soviet people are particularly revolted by this aggressive act of the American military clique after the people of the United States so warmly welcomed the chief of the Soviet state and President Eisenhower proclaimed his love of peace.”

Tommy Thompson knew that Supreme Soviet “debates” were usually orchestrated beforehand: he noted that the speakers were following Khrushchev’s lead. They denounced American “piracy,” but divorced Eisenhower from the “American military clique” and pledged a warm welcome in June:

Local workers’ meetings are being organized throughout the country in connection with the plane incident. The latter procedure is, of course, customary when any major problem or crisis arises, and the leadership may have felt compelled to follow standard practice in order to support the seriousness with which they view the incident.…

I believe there is no question but that the Soviets are genuinely angry at what they consider repeated violations of their territory. They have always reacted strongly to any statement or action which implied military weakness on their part.…

It is also possible that Khrushchev is discouraged over prospects for the Summit and wishes to prepare the Soviet public for the failure of this meeting to result in progress toward his goals. Although some of my diplomatic colleagues think the Soviets may have desired to provoke us into cancellation of this meeting in view of dim prospects, I think this unlikely.

Friday morning in Washington. Like the Supreme Soviet delegates, United States Senators were outraged—but at the downing of an “innocent American plane.” Mike Mansfield, the Democratic whip: “It’s a fine thing when the Russians shoot first and complain later.” Republican Styles Bridges of New Hampshire demanded that the President boycott the Paris Summit unless Khrushchev gave him a proper explanation.

Almost the entire U.S. Congress was ignorant about the U-2. Allen Dulles had secretly briefed senior members of the House and Senate Armed Services and Appropriations Committees, as he generally did on major intelligence projects, but that was all. J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had never heard of the program.

Major American papers in the East generally restrained themselves from condemning the Soviet action. James Reston asked in his New York Times column “why it is necessary, a few days before President Eisenhower’s last-chance meeting with Khrushchev, to send planes aloft to check weather-data and wind-shear on the Soviet-Turkish border.” The Washington Post asked, “Why was the plane dispatched so close to Soviet territory that it could stray across the border even by accident?”

The restraint shown by Reston and Post editors was not merely preternatural insight. Months ago, they and other American journalists had discovered that the United States was sending spy planes across the Soviet Union. This was a world-important scoop, but every national reporter who learned the secret refrained from publication to keep from harming American national security.

At the White House, Richard Bissell and George Kistiakowsky exchanged commiserations on the U-2. As the science adviser recorded, “Dick said that the pilot is apparently alive and is being interrogated which, of course, won’t help the situation.”

At 9:53 A.M., Douglas Dillon and Goodpaster went to the Oval Office, where the President was “grumbling” over Thompson’s cable that the pilot might be alive. “We didn’t know whether it was accurate or not, but it gave us pause,” Dillon later recalled. “We acted on the assumption from then on that they probably had the pilot and that they probably had a good deal of the plane.”

Goodpaster reported that Dulles and Bissell were nervous about the congressmen who were denouncing Khrushchev for shooting down the plane. If the truth came out and the congressmen looked foolish, they might turn their wrath upon the President and CIA. Dulles and Bissell wanted the President to “take Congressional leaders at least partly into his confidence to prevent the building up of indignation in Congress, which would only pour more fuel on the fire.”

Eisenhower refused: “These Congressional fellows will inevitably spill the beans.”

At noon, the President was driven to the Washington Armory, where he snipped a ribbon opening an AFL-CIO trade show and toured the exhibition with union boss George Meany. At the barbers’ booth, he ran into his own barber, Steve Martini, and said, “I don’t need him very much. I just say, ‘Come in and clip my neck, Steve.’” Catching sight of a Fiberglas boat, he said, “That reminds me: I’m taking to Premier Khrushchev, if I go, a new kind of boat that has no propeller.”

If I go? Merriman Smith of UPI, Robert Pierpoint of CBS and Newsweek’s Roberts ran for telephones. Hagerty was asked if the President’s remark meant he was thinking of canceling his Soviet trip and replied, “No comment.” Outside the Armory, the President took off in Marine One for a weekend at Gettysburg.

George Allen stood at his side as he whacked a ball over two hundred yards down the first fairway of the Gettysburg golf club. Someone shouted, “There’s not a Democrat in the world who can hit a ball like that!” and Eisenhower laughed with the crowd.

At Lincoln White’s noon briefing, State Department reporters asked whether orders given American planes flying near the Soviet border had been changed. “There is no change to be made,” he said. “The gentleman informed us that he was having difficulty with his oxygen equipment. Now our assumption is that the man blacked out. There was absolutely no—N, O—no deliberate attempt to violate Soviet airspace. There never has been.”

In Turkey, CIA agents asked a groggy Barbara Powers to pack her bags to fly immediately to the United States. “Where’s my husband?” she cried. “I demand to know what has happened to Gary!” But by her account, they told her nothing: “Everything is going to be all right, Mrs. Powers. Now please, just do as we say.”

At Lubyanka Prison, Moscow, Francis Gary Powers was learning why he had been driven around the city the previous day—not because the Russians intended to release him, but because they evidently presumed that the excursion might loosen him up for the punishing interrogations that lay ahead. As Powers later recalled, from this point on, his captors were no longer friendly.

Saturday, the seventh of May. In Moscow, Khrushchev was scheduled to wind up the meeting of the Supreme Soviet with his own benediction. Having no desire for another cameo appearance in another of Khrushchev’s morality dramas, Llewellyn Thompson stayed home and sent a second secretary from the Embassy in his stead.

At one in the afternoon, the man of the hour made his entrance to the usual standing ovation. Khrushchev opened his text and slid the curled earpieces of his rimless reading glasses around his ears. After a preamble, he gripped the sides of the lectern:

“Comrade Deputies! The aggressive act committed by the U.S. Air Force against the Soviet Union has justifiably incensed Deputies and all Soviet people.” With a smirk, he read out the most tantalizing portions of the State Department and NASA announcements. Then he dropped his bombshell:

“Comrades, I must let you in on a secret. When I made my report two days ago, I deliberately refrained from mentioning that we have the remnants of the plane—and we also have the pilot, who is quite alive and kicking!” Thunderous applause. Outside the Great Kremlin Hall, chauffeurs leaning against Cadillacs, Zils and Bentleys threw back their heads in laughter.

“We did this quite deliberately, because if we had given out the whole story, the Americans would have thought up still another fable. And now, just look how many silly things they have said: Lake Van, scientific research and so on. Now when they learn that the pilot is alive, they will have to think up something else. And they will!”

Hoots and more laughter. “First of all, I wish to announce that the pilot of the downed American plane is alive and in good health. He is now in Moscow. The pilot’s name is Francis Gary Powers. He is thirty years old. He says he is a first lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force, where he served until 1956—that is, until the day he went over to the Central Intelligence Agency.”

Khrushchev reported that the pilot had testified that he had had “no dizziness” or faulty oxygen equipment. Following orders, he had been flying along an assigned route, switching on and off his apparatus for spying on the Soviet Union “until the very moment his pirate flight into this country was cut short.”

Khrushchev pulled out large copies of aerial photographs and waved them at the American diplomat. “Here are some of the pictures showing military airfields. Here—look at this! Here are the airfields—here! Fighters in position on the ground. Two little white strips. Here they are! Here they are!” More thunderous applause.*

“Also a tape recording of the signals of a number of our ground radar stations—incontestable evidence of spying.… And the people behind this pirate flight could not think up anything better than the stupid story that this was a weather plane and that when the pilot lost consciousness, his plane—literally a runaway horse—dragged him against his will into Soviet territory. What innocence!”

In case someone doubted the pilot was really alive, Khrushchev gave out information about Powers’s unit in Turkey—his commander, Colonel William Shelton, his NASA disguise, his takeoff not in Turkey but Pakistan, and the curious fact that he had chosen to bail out by parachute: “Why did he do this if there was an ejection seat? Maybe because there was an explosive in the plane that was supposed to blow up the plane as soon as the pilot ejected. The pilot knew this and perhaps was afraid that he would be killed in the explosion. Clever enough!

“But this diabolical machine was not the only precaution taken. To cover up his crime, the pilot was told that he must not be captured alive by the Soviets.… He was to jab himself with this poison pin, which would have killed him instantly. What barbarism!” Holding up a picture of the pin, he cried, “Here it is! The latest achievement of American technology for killing their own people!”

“Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!” cried the deputies.

“But everything alive wants to live.… When he landed, he did not follow the advice of those who sent him.… He stayed alive.”

Khrushchev revealed that the pilot had also carried a pistol with a silencer: “Why a noiseless pistol? Not to take air samples, but to blow out someone’s brains!” Thousands of rubles and French gold francs: “I have seen them with my eyes and you can see them here in this photograph. They are covered with cellophane on both sides—done in a cultured, American way.” Two gold watches and seven gold ladies’ rings: “Perhaps he was supposed to have flown still higher, to Mars, and seduced the Martian ladies!” More laughter, and then the fun was over:

“From the lofty rostrum of the Supreme Soviet, we warn those countries that make their territory available for launching planes with anti-Soviet intentions: Do not play with fire, gentlemen! The governments of Turkey, Pakistan and Norway must be clearly aware that they are accomplices in this flight.… If these governments did not know—and I allow in this case they were not informed—they should have known what the American military was doing in their territory against the Soviet Union.”

Khrushchev noted the indignation of American congressmen and journalists that the Soviet Union should have downed an American plane: “How would they react if our plane intruded into the United States and flew about two thousand kilometers over American territory? Perhaps these outraged people would rather seek the answer from Allen Dulles.… The whole world knows that Allen Dulles is no great weatherman!”

As for Powers, “I think it will be proper to prosecute this flier so that world opinion can see what actions the Americans are taking to provoke the Soviet Union and heat up the atmosphere, thus reversing those successes which have been achieved in relieving international tensions.

“I remember the talks I had with Americans. They impressed me very much. I still believe that those who met me want peace and friendly relations with the Soviet Union. But apparently the Pentagon militarists and their monopolist allies cannot halt their war efforts.”

Once again Khrushchev divorced this military clique from Eisenhower: “I am quite willing to grant that the President knew nothing about the fact that such a plane was sent into the Soviet Union.… But this should put us even more on guard.

“When the military starts bossing the show, the results can be disastrous. Such a pirate, prone to dizziness, may in fact drop a hydrogen bomb on foreign soil. And this means that the peoples of the land where this pirate was born will unavoidably and immediately get a more destructive hydrogen bomb in return.”

As the deputies stood and pounded their benches with fists, Priscilla Johnson felt “emotionally spent and years older than when I had entered the hall.”

The AP’s London bureau flashed the astonishing news:

PREMIER NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV TOLD THE SOVIET PEOPLE IN MOSCOW TODAY THAT THE PILOT OF THE AMERICAN AIRCRAFT SHOT DOWN OVER SOVIET TERRITORY IS ALIVE. MOSCOW RADIO, REPORTING KHRUSHCHEV’S ANNOUNCEMENT, DID NOT IMMEDIATELY GIVE THE PILOT’S CONDITION.

The bulletin rattled out in newsrooms on the Eastern Seaboard after dawn on Saturday—too late for almost all but Western papers to remake their front pages. The Los Angeles Times yanked its headline and ran a huge new banner across the top of its final edition: “DOWNED PILOT ALIVE, NIKITA TELLS SOVIET.” Forty hours before deadline, Time’s editors junked the cover story already printed for next week.

In Pound, Virginia, Oliver Powers and his family were told the news and they wept. When a reporter asked about Khrushchev’s charge that Francis was a spy, the father said, “Absolutely ridiculous.”

In Paris, Charles de Gaulle found the whole story “a bad comedy in questionable taste.”

In London, when brought the news, Harold Macmillan was brooding about the Commonwealth. In his diary, he wrote, “The Russians have got the machine, the cameras, a lot of the photographs—and the pilot. The President, State Department and Pentagon have all told separate and conflicting stories and are clearly in a state of panic.

“Khrushchev has made two very amusing and effective speeches attacking the Americans for spying incompetently and lying incompetently too. He may declare the Summit off. Quite a pleasant Saturday—the Commonwealth in pieces and the Summit doomed!” He found it “hard to avoid a feeling almost of despair.”

Cancellation of the Summit was not Macmillan’s only anxiety. Perhaps the best-guarded secret of all was that the U-2 incursions had actually been jointly waged by the British and American intelligence services. The previous weekend at Chequers, Macmillan’s official country residence, his intelligence briefer, Sir Patrick Dean of the Foreign Office, had reported that the U-2 pilot was waiting to fly from Peshawar.

The Prime Minister often mused that only eight hydrogen bombs were required to remove the British people from civilization. Despite his threats to the Turks and Pakistanis, Khrushchev was unlikely to take military retaliation for the U-2. But what might he do if and when he discovered that the British had been partners in the violations of Soviet airspace?

From Moscow, Llewellyn Thompson cabled Washington:

Watching Khrushchev on television deliver his speech to the Supreme Soviet today, it was evident he was thoroughly enjoying his performance and frequently departed from his written text to underscore points.… From shots of the Presidium and audience, I received the impression of anxiety in contrast to his speech at the opening, where there was clear expression of nationalistic feeling.

From such information as we have received, the general reaction of the ordinary Soviet citizen is one of deep resentment—particularly the fact that the event occurred on May Day. The Soviet people are deeply concerned about the possibility of war and their frequent demonstrations of pro-American sentiment are probably directly related to the realization that friendship and understanding with the U.S. is the surest way to prevent the recurrence of war.…

It is difficult to assess Khrushchev’s motives in playing this so hard. I believe he was really offended and angry, that he attaches great importance to stopping this kind of activity, and that he believes this will put him in an advantageous position at the Summit. There is no doubt that we have suffered a major loss in Soviet public opinion and probably throughout the world.…

A more menacing interpretation is that Khrushchev realizes … that he cannot make progress at the Summit and … therefore could be exploiting this incident to prepare public opinion for an eventual crisis.… I also cannot help but think, although evidence is very slight, that Khrushchev is having some internal difficulties and this incident affords him a convenient diversion.

Judging by the display which Khrushchev made of evidence in the Supreme Soviet today, I would doubt that we can continue to deny charges of deliberate overflight. Khrushchev has himself stated the dilemma with which we are faced: should we deny that the President himself had actual knowledge of this action?

From Denver, John Eisenhower returned to the former Pitzer Schoolhouse in Gettysburg, where he and his family lived a mile from the President’s house. The President’s son was a self-effacing presence in the White House entourage, viewing the events and personalities around him with the keen eye of the historian he later became.

Born in 1922 at the Denver home of his maternal grandparents after the death of the Eisenhowers’ firstborn son, John was a fierce defender of the President and his works, a loyal aide and a strong-willed man striving to win a “degree of independence” from a strong-willed father. Son of an obscure Army officer for his first twenty years, John’s change of fate made him perhaps more impatient with the demands of paternal celebrity than other sons who grew up accustomed to them. He loathed “big-time publicity” and the memory of his West Point graduation on D-Day 1944, of all moments, when photographers had chased him and his mother to the superintendent’s great black car, in which they were driven away “like royalty.”

From the European theater, the General wrote Mamie of their son, “I’m so tied up in him it hurts.” After VE-Day, the senior Eisenhower was feeling lonely in Germany. Posted half an hour away, John and his father spent what John later considered the most amiable time of their lives, listening to Gershwin records and playing with the General’s dogs. Then the father went to Washington and the son to Vienna, where he met his future wife, Barbara Thompson, a beautiful and extroverted Army daughter who made up for John’s shyness and impatience with small talk.

He taught English at West Point, took a master’s degree in English literature at Columbia University, and served at Fort Knox before entering combat in Korea. Returning to America in 1953, he resisted the White House “as best I could, fighting to retain the identity of myself and my family.” Still he had to lead a double existence, enduring harassment by his superior at Fort Benning before boarding the Presidential airplane with his family to spend Thanksgiving with the President and First Lady.

Like Franklin Roosevelt and his son James, Dwight Eisenhower saw no reason why the fact that he was President should deny him the pleasure of his son’s companionship and help. In 1954, John was briefly posted to the Presidential staff. In 1957, his father told him, “Goodpaster’s going on leave. You’re it for the time he’s gone.” In 1958, when John was serving at the Pentagon, the President asked him to join the White House full-time as Goodpaster’s deputy.

During the week, John lived on the third floor of the Mansion. In the early evening, he was often summoned for cocktails with “the Boss,” as he fastidiously called his father around the West Wing. Sitting in overstuffed chairs in the upstairs Oval Room with its war trophies and decorations, father and son spoke of baseball, the stock market, almost anything but the day at work. Ann Whitman soon noticed that John was with his father “practically all the President’s free time—and a good thing, I am sure.”

The telephone rang in the Pitzer Schoolhouse: it was Goodpaster, calling with “tough news.” John asked, “Just how tough are things, General?”

“About as tough as they can get. They’ve got the pilot alive.”

John bitterly recalled Allen Dulles’s “absolutely categorical” assurances that a U-2 pilot would not survive a crash. Many years later, he said that the memory still put him “into a war dance,” and insisted that “Allen Dulles lied to Dad.”

Some at the White House thought staff members had a tendency to arrange for John to be the one to bring his father bad tidings: the President’s temper was notorious and he was one aide assured of job security. On weekends at Gettysburg, he was (in his own words) the President’s “principal link with the outside world.”

He climbed into his car, drove down Waterworks Road and turned right, past the Secret Service guardpost, down the driveway to the rambling white house his parents had built over the frame of an old red farmhouse in the mid-1950s. He found his father standing in the glassed-in porch in the rear, looking out on the lime-green Civil War battlegrounds he cherished. On this porch eight months ago, Khrushchev had sat John’s children on his knee. That day seemed a lifetime ago as John broke the news.

The President’s reaction: “Unbelievable.” He had seen Thompson’s cable that the pilot might be alive, but that had been only a rumor. Now he knew that Khrushchev had irrefutable evidence that his administration had deliberately violated Soviet airspace, spied on the Soviet Union and several times lied about it to the world.

There must be some response to Khrushchev’s speech—especially Khrushchev’s “willingness to grant” that the CIA and Pentagon had sent the U-2 into Russia without the President’s knowledge. Evidently Khrushchev was offering him an escape hatch. If Eisenhower used it, maintaining this fiction, then the Paris Summit might proceed.

But this would create other problems. What would the world think if the American President had so little control over his own government that minions could, without his knowledge, send planes into Russia that might conceivably start a war? And what if Khrushchev had already decided to scuttle the Summit anyway? The escape hatch might turn out to be a trap: if Eisenhower shirked responsibility for the U-2, Khrushchev might then reveal new evidence revealing the President personally to have lied.

Thus he had the choice of presenting himself as a leader whose government was capable of accidental provocation—or declaring in public that he was the man behind the U-2, the first time in history that an American President confessed that his government practiced espionage.

Repeatedly assured that he would never face such a dilemma, Eisenhower could fairly wonder how “this goddamned plane” had fallen in Russia and the pilot survived. Just a week ago, he had sat with his family in the cinema room at Camp David, looking forward to a “splendid exit” from office. Now he faced leaving the White House in the wake of perhaps the bitterest disappointment of his life, as if the gods who had always looked so kindly on him had suddenly decided to exact a price for their gifts of the past.

Tomorrow was the fifteenth anniversary of victory in Europe.

* The “U-2 photographs” Khrushchev held up before the Supreme Soviet were actually counterfeit. Having succeeded in halting the mission, he was clearly unwilling to allow even a small sample of its intelligence product to reach Washington.